Fighting the Right

Former Sen. Rick Santorum appeared on “Boston Herald Live” today, where he blamed the social safety net on the rise of single parenthood, which he somehow managed to link to gay-inclusive books in schools, and the supposed blackout of books about families led by opposite-sex couples.

“I know in the schools in Massachusetts, in the grade school, they teach — there are books in place that say ‘Suzy has two moms,’ it’s okay to put a book that says ‘Suzy has two moms’ but you can’t put a book in there saying that moms and dads and marriage is important and tell people how important it is to be married before you have children, then you’re moralizing,” Santorum said. “It’s okay to say, ‘Suzy has two moms’ or ‘Johnny has two dads,” but you can’t say that marriage is an important part of having a stable and healthy economy.”

When the host asked if he would focus on rolling back abortion rights and same-sex marriage if elected president, Santorum said that he would indeed do so because “strengthening the American family” is “important not just for a culture but it’s important for education.”

He added that government policies discourage women from marriage and instead boost cohabitation: “That’s the most dangerous place for children in America, it’s a mother and a child living with a man who is not the father of that child. We’re creating dangerous homes, we’re creating barriers to marriage and family formation all because of our welfare policies.”

End Times radio host Rick Wiles yesterday sounded off on a recently-released photo of a 7-year-old Queen Elizabeth “mimicking her uncle, the future king Edward VIII,” in making the Nazi salute. The “Trunews” host cited the 1933 photo as proof that “the Nazis are in control of the West right now, the United States of America has been taken over by neo-Nazis.”

And who are our Nazi overlords?

“The left, the homosexual rights movement, the abortionists, these are Nazis, they’re Nazis,” he said.

Responding to the Chattanooga shooting, Wiles alleged that “millions of Americans will die in one day in this country” after Muslim-Americans, whom he claims only seek “to slaughter the people who do not convert to Islam,” take up arms en masse against non-Muslims in a violent “day of jihad.”

Last week on “The Sam Malone Show,” conservative pundit Wayne Allyn Root wondered if Hillary Clinton is scheming with President Obama and ACORN, the organizing group which shut down in 2010, in order to steal the upcoming presidential election through massive voter fraud.

Root speculated that Obama threatened to launch a Justice Department investigation into the Clinton Foundation if the former secretary of state refused to endorse the Iran deal, but told her that “if you go along with this, I’ll help you steal the election like I did in 2012. I’ll get my old pals from ACORN back together again, the old gang is back, and we will steal states with weak voter ID laws, we’ll have illegal aliens voting, we’ll figure out ways to stuff the ballot box in inner cities so that more people vote than are registered to vote in that district. We will figure out a way to steal you the election the same way we stole it for me. But if you go against me, you’re done.”

Malone later stated that “how any liberal Jew out there in Hollywood could support the President or Hillary Clinton at this point is beyond me,” and hoped that they realize that “the Democratic Party is the party against the Holy Land.”

Jerry Johnson, president of the National Religious Broadcasters, appeared on TheDove TV last week to discuss the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down state gay marriage ban to warn that if the ruling doesn't mobilize a Christian revival in this nation, it will "bring the country down."

"This manufactured idea of so-called same-sex marriage," he said, "it's a rejection of the Creator and the created order for human sexuality ... I just know something that wrong can never be legally right."

"This cannot stand," he continued. "It will either bring the country down or we'll have a great renewal and a great revival and a great awakening and it can be reversed."

Corsi told host and fellow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that Clinton and Abedin are not only lovers, but also secret agents of the Muslim Brotherhood. Along with Obama, whom he says “has been Muslim Brotherhood from the beginning,” Corsi claims that the administration engineered the 2012 Benghazi attack and are working to arm Al Qaeda.

He also beseeched “the Jews in America who have any allegiance left to Israel” to “realize that Obama is an enemy of Israel.”

As Lipkin explained, Muslim foreign leaders are leery of establishing close relations with the United States "because America seems to have this tendency to stab allies in the back." As evidence, he pointed to U.S. support of Saddam Hussein during Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s, which was then followed by the Gulf War, when the U.S. repelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

Lipkin baselessly claimed that Hussein was responsible the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, and the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, all as payback for having been betrayed by the United States, which eventually forced President George W. Bush to capture and execute him during the Iraq war.

"Saddam Hussein was betrayed by the United States, in his opinion," Lipkin said. "The Oklahoma City Bombing was a Saddam Hussein attack. The first attack on the World Trade Center in February '93 was a Saddam Hussein attack. The shooting down of TWA 800 was a Saddam Hussein attack. That's why George W. [Bush] got rid of him in 2003."

Today on “The 700 Club,” Pat Robertson fielded a question about an anti-choice group’s deceptively edited videos targeting Planned Parenthood, which led the televangelist to rail against the Supreme Court over the Roe v. Wade decision.

He then criticized the court for its recent ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, arguing that now polygamy, bestiality and pedophilia will all become legal nationwide.

“Watch what happens, love affairs between men and animals are going to be absolutely permitted,” Robertson said. “Polygamy, without question, is going to be permitted. And it will be called a right.”

Robertson also agreed with co-host Terry Meeuwsen’s claim that gay marriage will also legalize “relationships with children,” claiming that “they’re going to succeed now” in legalizing pedophilia.

Sher Zieve, a columnist for Matt Barber’s conspiracy theory outlet BarbWire, is the latest right-wing pundit to cite the death of Kate Steinle, who was recently killed by an undocumented immigrant in a shooting in San Francisco, to attack President Obama.

According to Zeive, Obama is trying to “ignore” the “murders of young white women” because he is a satanic leader bent on killing all white people.

“For any of you who happen to be white, you’re in deep trouble and it’s getting worse,” she wrote last week. “Obama has placed minorities in a special class and whites with targets on their backs. As I’ve written before, Obama and his syndicate are working overtime to begin a race war. He will have it or begin his personal genocide of…guess who? As usual, we’ll be forced to fight for our lives or accept our slaughter by the hands of a Luciferian tyrant.”

Someone had to say it plainly: to the Obama Administration white lives don’t matter.

At the highest levels of the US government, minority criminals who caused their own deaths via their own actions are extolled over and over again while Obama representatives attend one funeral after another and Obama publicly and often offers his “condolences” to the families.

…

So, illegals crossing our Southern border—which Obama has demanded not be stopped by the US Border Patrol—come to the USA to murder those they cannot in Mexico…especially and apparently murders of young white women whom Obama will simply and loudly-with-his -ongoing-silence ignore.

For any of you who happen to be white, you’re in deep trouble and it’s getting worse. Obama has placed minorities in a special class and whites with targets on their backs.

As I’ve written before, Obama and his syndicate are working overtime to begin a race war. He will have it or begin his personal genocide of…guess who? As usual, we’ll be forced to fight for our lives or accept our slaughter by the hands of a Luciferian tyrant. And I suspect, tragically, that all too many are ready to die.

After all, it’s better than being called a racist…by minority racists. Right?

Pat Dollard, the conservative filmmaker and Breitbart contributor, saidtoday on Twitter that black people are waging a “race war on whites,” pointing to the ongoing debate over Confederate flag and monuments on public land, which he called “monuments to white people.”

It is now time for white people to respond, Dollard said, by going after “monuments to blacks.”

In their ongoing race war on whites, blacks have now targeted the confederate flag and monuments to white people. Time to target theirs.

Conservative columnist Sylvia Thompson warned BarbWire readers last week that gay people “will sorely regret” their “choice” to be gay, suggesting that God is punishing gay people with HIV/AIDS.

“The rampant disease, both medical and mental, permeating the homosexual and other deviant populations is staggering for such a small portion of society,” she said, adding that “it may take something even more drastic than dying in droves to open eyes and hearts.”

Thompson also warned that “satanic,” “tyrannical” and “depraved” gay rights advocates will also target Christians who oppose them: “It does not matter what the consequences may be, even if those consequences are imprisonment or death, or both. In the ultimate end, when God intervenes, the Christian who follows His dictates will be vindicated.”

Whatever the depraved state of homosexual activists and whatever the satanic hold they may have on the legal system in this country, believing Christians must answer to God whenever Caesar runs amok.

It does not matter what the consequences may be, even if those consequences are imprisonment or death, or both. In the ultimate end, when God intervenes, the Christian who follows His dictates will be vindicated. The stubbornly unrepentant will eventually be destroyed, regardless of what weak-willed and apostate professed Christian leaders tell them.

Therefore, a comparison of the civil rights of people who are immutably black to homosexuals who choose their behavior is a bogus comparison. I am certain the homosexual movement is well aware of that fact. Disingenuousness and lying, after all, are its primary hallmarks.

As I have said before, this issue has nothing to do with civil rights. It is all about a small, tyrannical segment of our rotting culture that has foolishly taken issue with Almighty God. They will sorely regret that choice in due time, if they are not already regretting it.

The rampant disease, both medical and mental, permeating the homosexual and other deviant populations is staggering for such a small portion of society. It should be clear evidence that those who embrace deviant sexual sin are way off base. But apparently not; it may take something even more drastic than dying in droves to open eyes and hearts.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, suggested during a conversation with Gov. Scott Walker on his “Washington Watch” radio program last week that Planned Parenthood opposes 20-week abortion bans such as the one recently passed by the House because they can make more money selling the “parts” of later-term fetuses.

Perkins was discussing a right-wing group’s deceptively edited shock video that purported to show that the reproductive health group sells “aborted baby parts” for a profit, in violation of federal law. In reality, the group donates fetal tissue to medical research with the patient’s consent.

“This suggests why they may have been opposed to bans such as this, these five-month bans, because the longer the pregnancy goes, the more valuable the parts,” Perkins alleged.

Walker, who signed such a ban into law in Wisconsin today, didn’t address Perkins’ claim directly, but restated his desire to make sure that “Planned Parenthood is defunded from any tax dollars, be it at the local or state or the federal level.”

Last week on “Washington Watch,” Rick Santorum spoke to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins about an anti-choice group’s deceptivelyedited video targeting Planned Parenthood, arguing that the reproductive health organization has been corrupt from the get-go.

“The person who started Planned Parenthood was a racist, was a segregationist, was a eugenicist, and they have not strayed far at all from their original idea, which is to deconstruct humanity,” Santorum said.

Santorum also suggested that President Obama is hypocritical for supporting Planned Parenthood: “To see a president who talks about civil rights and talks about discrimination and to see him align himself with an organization with this history, and now this present abuse, illegal criminal activity, for him not to step forward and prosecute this fully just shows you that it’s not a moral issue, it’s simply a power and political issue, and that’s what’s driving the current Democratic Party and this president.”

While Santorum is correct that Sanger was a supporter of the eugenics movement, as PolitiFact noted, the movement “had been widely accepted” at the time among political leaders including Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover: “In other words, supporting eugenics did not automatically equal racism.” Biographers have also found that Sanger strongly opposed racial segregation. Instead, her critics have relied on a single quote that they have badlydistorted.

Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson are slated to speak later this month at an “All Lives Matter” summit, which is trying to use the language of Black Lives Matter protesters to denounce abortion rights. The conference is sponsored by the Freedom’s Journal Institute and the World Congress of Families, a far-right organization that has faced scrutiny for its role in pushing extreme anti-LGBT laws in Russia and around the world.

One conference organizer, Eric Wallace, a black conservative activist whobriefly ran for U.S. Senate in 2010, said in a statement that Black Lives Matter activists are ignoring “the thousands of Black babies killed every day” and “Black on Black crime”:

Current events have called into question (by some) whether Black lives matter. Does Black Life really matter? That is not a new question, Black pro-life groups and others have been asking this question ever since Roe vs Wade. But, where are the cries for the thousands of Black babies killed every day? Where is the outrage for the hundreds of young black males being incarcerated? Or the disgrace concerning Black on Black crime? Where are the voices calling for school choice in public education? And where are those who are truly concerned about issues such as economic empowerment?

Under the banner of defending “the family,” the World Congress of Families supported a Russian ban on speech considered to be pro-LGBT “propaganda” as it helped right-wing activists to build up a Religious Right infrastructure in the country. One group spokesman hailed Russian leaders as “the Christian saviors of the world” for “preventing [gays] from corrupting children.”

It is rather fitting that Huckabee and Carson, two candidates who regularly claim that Americans, and conservatives in particular, are losing their freedom of speech, are aligning with a group that supports the criminalization of free speech on LGBT issues.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been facing a firestorm after he refused to say this weekend whether he thinks people choose to be gay. Walker told CNN’s Dana Bash that he didn’t “know the answer to that question,” all the while boasting in the same interview that “people find [it] unique” that “I actually answer questions. People ask me a question, I’ll answer a question.”

Walker’s (non)comments on homosexuality come after the Republican presidential candidate said that he supported the Boy Scouts of America’s current ban on gay scoutmasters “because it protected children and advanced Scout values.”

Incomprehensibly, a campaign spokesman later said that Walker was only saying that “the previous policy protected Scouts from the rancorous political debate over policy issues and culture war.”

But snubbing direct questions and finding ways to take contradicting stances on basic policy issues has been the way Walker has been campaigning from the beginning.

1) ‘Punt’ on Evolution

Walker raised eyebrows earlier this year when he refused to answer a straightforward question on whether he believes in the theory of evolution, explaining: “I’m going to punt on that one as well. That’s a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or the other. So I’m going to leave that up to you.”

When asked about it again days later, Walker stood by his refusal to answer the question, simply saying that he thinks “science and my faith aren’t incompatible.”

2) ‘I Don’t Know’ If Obama Is A Christian

Following his “punt” on evolution, Walker fielded a question from the Washington Post on whether he believes that President Obama is a Christian. “I don’t know,” Walker replied, a stance he continued to take even after he was “told that Obama has frequently spoken publicly about his Christian faith,” explaining: “I’ve never asked him that.”

A spokesman later told the Post that Walker does believe Obama is a Christian, he just didn’t want to answer “gotcha questions.”

3) ‘I Don’t Know’ If Obama Loves America

At the very same event where Walker refused to say whether he believes Obama is a Christian, the Wisconsin governor also declined to answer a question about whether Obama loves America.

Walker, who attended the dinner at which Rudy Giuliani claimed that Obama doesn’t love his country, told reporters: “You should ask the president what he thinks about America. I’ve never asked him so I don’t know.”

“There’s not a flip out there,” Walker said. “A flip would be someone who voted on something and did something different. I don’t have any impact on immigration as a governor or former county official.”

Since he didn’t vote on anything because he was an executive official, Walker said, it doesn’t count, no matter what he has said in the past.

5) Misleading on Abortion Rights

During his race for re-election, Walker defended anti-choice legislation he signed by insisting in a TV ad that “the bill leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.”

Such remarks weren’t received well by anti-choice activists, who agreed with Walker’s pro-choice detractors that the governor was trying to make it seem like he was protecting reproductive rights and keeping abortion “safe” for women.

Now as a presidential candidate, Walker has been catering to anti-choice leaders, reportedly telling them that, as one paraphrased, he was “using the language of the other side” to promote his anti-abortion views.

When Laura Ingraham, a right-wing radio host, asked him last week, “You don’t believe the final decision should be between a woman and her doctor?,” Walker said, “No.”

At least he finally answered that question in a straightforward way. It’s too bad that he rarely gives such clear answers to voters.

That interview, which aired on last week's "Hagee Hotline" program, contained a declaration from Gohmert that the only way that Congress can hope to stop the Iran deal from going forward is through an act of God, along with a warning that God will punish America for betraying Israel.

"We have made it next to impossible to stop this Iranian deal," the Texas Republican said, "so if it gets stopped, as it should, God needs to get the glory and praise. And everybody that's here with Citizens United for Israel [sic] will be the hands and feet to make that happen."

"This is a horrible bill," Gohmert continued, "and I know a lot of people think the United States is the sole superpower, we're going to be here forever, but you know no country lasts forever. We have betrayed Israel so often ... We have betrayed Israel over and over and we're in trouble for that."

From anti-adoption rules in Russia to laws banning same-sex intimacy in the Caribbean, the right-wing global movement against LGBT rights – especially its U.S. leaders working transnationally – was under the microscope this weekend during a panel at Netroots Nation.

Gillian Kane kicked off the presentations by highlighting that those attacking the rights of LGBT people across the world are also often leading attacks on other rights, including reproductive freedoms. She noted that U.S.-based anti-LGBT activists working transnationally, like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), strategically frame themselves as victims of religious persecution rather than those working to undermine the rights of others. Kane recently published an article on ADF's expansion in Latin America.

Maurice Tomlinson gave a snapshot of the current status of anti-LGBT laws in Jamaica and across the Western hemisphere. He pointed out that Belize and Trinidad & Tobago both ban the entrance of gay people into the country, and that a total of 11 countries in the Western hemisphere still criminalize same-gender intimacy. In Jamaica, Tomlinson noted, “our culture has been perverted” by the exportation of homophobia from the global North for many decades. He also highlighted some of the work happening in Jamaica to fight anti-gay laws, including everything from lawsuits to flashmobs.

Miranda Blue, who authored People For the American Way’s report on Globalizing Homophobia, highlighted the case study of the push for anti-LGBT legislation in Russia, a campaign which she pointed out "hasn’t come out of a vacuum.” She said that Putin is both trying to silence dissent and frame Russia as a bastion of traditional values. Many on the Right in the U.S., she said, have bought into this framing, cheering on the laws and saying that the U.S. should have similar ones. Blue noted that Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage even traveled to Moscow to testify in front of the parliament in support of an anti-gay adoption law.

Urooj Arshad focused on how to do solidarity work with LGBT activists based in the global South and warned against the conflation of the West with LGBT rights. She urged U.S.-based LGBT rights activists to always be in communication with those working and living locally. Arshad, who grew up in Pakistan, noted that in many formerly colonized countries, the criminalization of homosexuality came with colonization, with many of the anti-sodomy laws from that era still on the books.

Peter Montgomery pulled all of the speakers' presentations together by framing the anti-LGBT attacks happening around the world as a unified right-wing movement rather than isolated campaigns. He pointed out the number of laws globally that have been directly supported by right-wing organizations in the U.S., and said that activists here can help support LGBT activists abroad by chipping away at the credibility of U.S. groups that are helping fuel this work internationally.

“You wonder if he actually knows the history of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger, who was trying to eliminate black people,” he said. “That was the whole purpose of it.”

His allegation rests on a debunked claim that has circulated through right-wing circles for years that Sanger was using birth control to exterminate the African American community.

Carson also promised that he would use Hillary Clinton’s praise for Sanger and her relationship with Saul Alinsky against her in the presidential race, claiming that he would “educate the people” that the campaign is really about a divide between “American and anti-American things.” This led him to attack the Affordable Care Act, which he said was illegitimately “shoved down our throat” … even though it became a law just as any other law does through an act of Congress.

The GOP candidate later returned to the Planned Parenthood video.

“If we can’t defund Planned Parenthood after this, we’re lost, we’re just in the wilderness forever,” he said. “This is the smoking gun. We’ve always known the kind of organization this and how anti-life they are.”

He also claimed that the video will help him make the case that abortion should be banned: “We can also use this then to help women understand that they are being manipulated. They’re being told, ‘if you can’t kill your baby then somebody is against you,’ when in fact the woman is the protector of that baby, this is one of the sacred relationships of humanity.”

Jindal, who reacted to the phony scandal by launching an investigation into Planned Parenthood in his state, repeated his call to defund the organization, saying that it’s not a health care organization because when a woman receives an abortion she is not a “patient.”

“They try to defend themselves by saying this is health care and patient-centered,” he said. “This is not health care. Abortions are not health care, and this is not about the patient. The patient in this case is that unborn baby. They’ve got no concern for the unborn baby, and you can see that in the video.”

Jindal also dismissed the famous Bill Clinton phrase calling for abortion to be "safe, legal and rare," saying, "Well, it's never safe for the baby, first of all."

During an appearance on “The Jan Mickelson Show” last week, Cruz insisted that “the Democrats support illegal immigration,” which led him to praise Trump for his remarks describing immigrants as rapists.

“It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been so vocal in the past couple of weeks defending Donald Trump because you’ve had a whole slew of 2016 Republican candidates running out of their way to smack Donald Trump with a stick, and not only am I not going to do that but I’ve been singing his praises,” Cruz said, before adding: “He is absolutely right.”